Tell that to the China’s ruling party. We Americans can go overboard with our flag-waving, but we don’t need Olympic glory to legitimize our way of life.

Like the old USSR, China sees the Olympics as a way to prove its ideological superiority. London has shown the ugly side of that all-consuming drive.

Wu Minxia might have been the saddest story of the Olympics. After she won a diving gold medal, she was told that her mother had breast cancer and her grandparents had died a year ago.

They didn’t want to tell her before London. It might have distracted her from her patriotic duty.

“We accepted a long time ago that she doesn’t belong entirely to us,” her father told the Shanghai Morning Post.

In China, children belong to the state if they show athletic promise. The system is based on the old Eastern Bloc template.

Promising kids are funneled into athletic schools according to their body types. They are taught reading and writing. But mostly they learn gymnastics, badminton, swimming and diving. Their purpose in life is to prove China is a world superpower.

“From a very young age, we had patriotism drummed into us,” one former athlete told the BBC.

Patriotism is one thing. The Chinese Communist Party promotes ultranationalism. Anything less than victory is an affront to the authoritarian state.

Americans go nutty with the “USA!” chants. But nobody was going to send Missy Franklin hate mails with razorblades if she didn’t win the 200-meter backstroke. That’s what a Chinese gymnast got when he returned home without a medal after the 1988 Olympics.

Gabby Douglas moved to Iowa at 14 to live and train for the Olympics. That was her choice, however, not the USOC’s. And nobody kept family secrets from her for the past two years.

The Chinese system gets results, but there’s a price. The BBC reported that of 300,000 former athletes, 80 percent were unemployed, injured or living in poverty.

The report showed the athletic training camps, which were more like Marine boot camps for 10-year-olds. British media ran photos of children forced to do handstands until they collapsed in tears. An instructor stepped on one child’s legs to increase gymnastic flexibility.

They were not the images China wants the world to see. Before the games, the Chinese Communist Party sent a directive to state-controlled media.

“Do not raise the issue of the ‘national system,’ ” it said.

The name of the system is Project 119. It started in 2001 and got its name from the number of gold medals available in swimming, track and field and rowing.

Those were sports with the greatest Chinese growth potential. Project 119 helped produce 51 gold medals in Beijing, which was 15 more than the United States. America won the overall medal count 110-100.

A lot of people thought China might win both in London. Instead, it has taken a step back. That’s fine by me, but I feel bad for the generation of Wu Minxias.

If Project 119 was rough, what will Project 120 be like?

“If we win a few less gold medals, ordinary people could abuse us,” said Xiao Tian, the head of China’s team.

It would be great if ordinary Chinese really did hear about the past two weeks in England. Not just about what happened, also the stories behind it.

China’s rulers wanted to prove their system is stronger than America’s. What London really showed was how weak it is.